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Airline Delays Flight Over Passenger's Suspicious Math Equations (usnews.com)
Earthquake Retrofit shares this article from the Associated Press: "An Ivy League professor said his flight was delayed because a fellow passenger thought the math equations he was writing might be a sign he was a terrorist... He said the woman sitting next to him passed a note to a flight attendant and the plane headed back to the gate. Guido Menzio, who is Italian and has curly, dark hair, said the pilot then asked for a word and he was questioned by an official... "They tell me that the woman was concerned that I was a terrorist because I was writing strange things on a pad of paper..." He was treated respectfully throughout, he added. But, he said, he was concerned about a delay that a brief conversation or an Internet search could have resolved. "Not seeking additional information after reports of 'suspicious activity'... is going to create a lot of problems, especially as xenophobic attitudes may be emerging."
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you're always afraid
Step out of line, the men come and take you away
We need to ramp up reverse retaliation on stupid people 100x fold to stop shit like this
I hope they billed the idiot for the inconvenience, expense and defamation...
... I hear the passengers thought he was with the Al-Gebra network - and he was holding potential weapons of math instruction.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
There's no shortage of kids in school that will tell you math is terrifying...
Oh no! Italians doing math?! They're only supposed to cook pasta and things. That's definitely out of character if you base it solely on cartoonish stereotypes.
..Unless he divided by zero.
That would create a NaN, and everything that touched it would also became a NaN, thus the passagers, plane fuselage, engines, ground...
...Osama is high-fiving Satan under a "Mission Accomplished" banner.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
To be fair, Professor Menzio (if that is his real name) was using Arabic numerals.
You are welcome on my lawn.
This has become a trend in American life: the culture of stupid.
Started with Sarah Palin, who couldn't even name a newspaper she read and people readily accepted that, and it carries on today, with Trump spouting platitudes and messages of hate (many self-contradictory) that wouldn't stand a few seconds of rational though. But he says them with the right anger tone and that's all it matters.
Next time it will be us geeks&nerds being detained because we are editing some code on our laptops.
Say no to hate, say no to ignorance.
At least this story brought us the caption "We can't fly on together with suspicious maths".
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl...
What if, and I'm just saying, what if he had been writing his mathy stuff and using METRIC UNITS!
This would clearly identify him as being a foreigner. And furthermore, he spoke English with an accent according to the article. Why would anyone learn to speak English with an accent unless they were, in fact, a terrorist?
Once exposed, he was no longer able to carry out his nefarious plot.
I say that woman did stop his plot. Kudos to you, plot-stopping heroine.
While this story might seem funny at first, it quickly becomes sad. Also very inconvenient for a few hundred people who sit on the plane and get delayed beacuse of an idiot. Lots of people would say better safe than sorry, but this is much more than that: usually ignorance won't hurt many people, but it can reach a point where it will make the lives of the rest of the population a living hell.
As a sidenote, such stories made me to really think about what I want to read on to/from-US planes, for many years now. Back in the days I mostly read technical stuff, papers, articles, but slowly I switched to "simple" novels with no math and no images. Might be crazy, but I just don't want to be the cause of some idiot delaying the flight - which, as we can see, happens from time to time.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
It sounds to me like they said, "Ok, we'd better check this out." Then they spent a few minutes, confirmed that everything was fine, and were on their way. Not a problem.
Yup, and if you RTFA a bit more carefully, you'll see that the flight was actually delayed because it had to return to the gate to let off the woman who had complained, because she was feeling ill. At the end of the day, the professor writing math got to stay on the plane, the woman who complained about it didn't. Damn, that doesn't make such a good headline, does it?
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
"Oh my lord, he's doing encryption!
Sure, there's a bit of fail on the part of the airline. The Washington Post article though seems to indicate significantly less stupidity on the part of the airline and the authorities than in other cases such as that UC Berkeley student who was forbidden from flying for speaking in arabic to his uncle. In this case, most of delay was from the false accuser faking illness. Only after a period of feigned sickness did she leave her seat, speak to the flight crew, and make her accusation. Dr. Menzio was then briefly interviewed and allowed to fly, while his accuser was taken off the plane and sent home on another flight.
That's less than the ideal outcome, of course. One shouldn't be able to delay a whole planeload of passengers by pretending to be sick in the first place. If you're too sick to fly, get off. Otherwise stay onboard, suck it up, and suffer. But, barring a legitimate life-threatening emergency, the flight should keep to its schedule. And once the false accusation was made, they should have just told her to shut up and quit being stupid, or get off the plane herself.
But even when the authorities overreact (As in the case of that UCB student. And yes the airline employees and LEOs should be punished themselves for that debacle.) the root cause is still that fist vicious
little bigot who decided to falsely accuse an innocent person of being a terrorist in the first place. So yeah... while the airline and law enforcement deserve some criticism in this case (And some ended careers in the other.), the hammer does also need to be dropped... hard and without mercy... on the original false accuser.
Imagine all the people...
We constantly blare over the PA systems, "If you see something, say something ..." and scare the population to no end with "all suspicious packages will be removed". We install jersey barriers in airport drop offs. So she saw something and said something. After training the population to be afraid of every passing shadow why expect them to exercise common sense or expect them to be reasonable?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Having someone make a report of this nature is a 100% predictable consequence of telling every American it's important for them to be on the lookout for we're-not-sure-what. Even in the absence of bigotry, there is still going to be a certain amount of noise in the system due to ignorance and straight up hallucinations. Maybe the leaders who proposed "see something say something" understood the consequences, but it hardly matters now; at this point all business owners can do is to get better at eliciting enough detail from the reporters and quickly confirming that it isn't anything to worry about.
The answer to his equations is obviously 42. What's the big deal?
So, it was an economist writing down a differential equation over a tray table.
An economist -- yeah, as an engineer, it would have been my ethical duty to report this to the authorities.
Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.' Isaac Asimov
I think the woman was too embarrassed to continur the flight.
FACE THE WRAITH OF THE PASSENGERS for delaying the flight for stupid reason.
There are dumb people everywhere. What's more worrying is that the cabin crew -- the people charged with the safety of their passengers -- were unable to deal with a simple situation and had to call for outside help. Were they also too dumb to gauge the danger posed by some scribbles on a piece of paper?
I kind of agree with the woman - everyone who has taken diffy q's knows they are evil!!